Sunday, November 13, 2011

There was one sweltering Summer where the classroom's air conditioner was hyperactive, and we measured it at 60°F in there. It was an unpleasantly humid, high 90's °F outside.

So we'd walk to school in shorts & T-shirts, and put on sweatpants and sweatshirts before going into lecture. It was silly. We had to keep warm clothes in our lockers outside the classroom, and during lectures would slug down hot coffee, tea, and cocoa to keep warm.

We called building maintenance repeatedly to complain, without success. I remember at one point a frustrated guy actually dialed them during a lecture, and screamed "DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW COLD IT IS IN HERE?" into the phone.

The next day we got to class to find they'd hung up a large wall thermometer, so we could see how cold it was (59°F).

I would have killed for 60 in undergrad. During fall camp for football we had our meetings in the only non-AC building on campus. There were multiple times where it was 95+ with 90% humidity both inside and outside. That makes it pretty miserable with 100 sweaty fat guys who have been on dorm food for a few days.

I worked among the chilled shelves at work (think cheese, yogurt, chilled ready meals, fresh pizza/soup) and would always have on a long sleeved shirt, a short sleeved uniform shirt, and jogging pants under my uniform pants. In 30 C summer weather outside. In the winter, I wore a polar fleece vest as well.

That's how it was at my university, but our classroom was shaped like an orchestra pit. The top level of the class was normal, towards the front (where the lecturer was) was freezing. We stayed in the same class and the lecturers came to us (I think that's common in medical training), so we would end up freezing all day.

I sat in towards the front. I get cold easily anyway, but when I chose my seat, I didn't think about the heating problem and, since we stayed in the same class, all the seats except for the very back row (where I couldn't see the lecturer) were taken by the time I figured it out.

For a while, I actually brought a space heater to class and had many students congregating around my row during breaks to warm up. That's probably why I was asked to stop bringing it, so instead I would wear thermals and bring coats in the middle of summer.

When I was in junior high school in the early 80's, one of my classrooms was freezing cold. I pretended that I had sprained my ankle and went to the nurse to get an ice pack, which we then put on the thermostat in the classroom. Warmed it up nicely!

Our nursing lecture hall had no heating in winter. Which ment it stayed around 50 inside. After a while we gave up and just brought sleeping bags and doonas to lecture. The lecturers did not mind, they were the ones who suggested it. I think the heating was fixed in time for summer.

We didn't have central heat in my house when I was growing up, just a little stove, so I typically wore a hat and mittens to bed in the winter, and I piled about 10 blankets on top of me. I put a thermometer in my room at one point and figured out the average temperature in my bedroom that winter was 30 degrees. I really didn't like that house.

I work at a fortune 100 corporate headquarters. In the summer we huddle in the end staircases that aren't air conditioned. In the winter, we are all wearing coats, hats, gloves and blankets in our cubes. I don't think the building ever reaches 60 degrees all year long.

My medical school is over-air conditioned. The best was during orientation when some bureaucrat proudly told us that, in the interests of sustainability, the university never air conditions to below seventy something as we were all sitting there freezing. Tuition dollars at work.

Yowza! Cool (Cruel?) Joke!Story: The female staff in my office set the stat to 27+ Celsius in the summer to comply with the energy saving policy, and to 27+ Celsius in the winter, thus using up all the elec that had been saved! (DuHH!)Consequence: I sleep "at the wheel" for about an hour every afternoon, summer or winter!

Ugh, I'm in med school right now and we have the opposite problem - around October 15th (and despite the pleasant, mild weather outdoors), someone switched the heating on in our lecture hall and it's now like an oven in there!

I've taken to wearing clothing in layers I can gradually remove, but it still has a tendency to make me sleepy within an hour or two of classes starting!

When I worked for the city, our building was FREEZING during the summer. The maintenance people begged to differ. One of our people put up a thermometer and reported the temperature to Those Above. It mysteriously disappeared that evening.

Sounds like the University of Iowa Music building when I was there. In the summer they a/c'd down to about 60, when it was close to 100 outside. In the winter practice rooms reached into the 90s when outside was maybe 10. You wore the same clothes year round in layers, the only difference was whether you were taking layers off or putting them on when you went inside.

We complained about the heat one spring because the west facing offices were reaching temps over 120 in the afternoon. The answer was that the scheduled change over from heat to a/c was May 1 (three weeks away) and they didn't have anybody to do it till then. The head of the school finally called facilities back and didn't mention the staff and students dropping like flies, but rather the millions of dollars of university equipment which was being irreparably damaged.

Welcome to my whining!

This blog is entirely for entertainment purposes. All posts about patients may be fictional, or be my experience, or were submitted by a reader, or any combination of the above. Factual statements may or may not be accurate.

Singing Foo!

Have Dr. Grumpy delivered automatically to your Kindle for only 99 cents a month! Sign up here!

Dr. Grumpy is for hire! Need an article written (humorous, medical, or otherwise) or want to commission a genuine Grumpy piece for your newspaper/magazine/toilet paper roll? Contact me to discuss subjects. You can reach me at the email address below, or through my Linked-In profile.

Note: I do not answer medical questions. If you are having a medical issue, see your own doctor. For all you know I'm really a Mongolian yak herder and have no medical training at all except in issues regarding the care and feeding of Mongolian yaks.